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The last character in Transformers: The Last Knight is one we’ve been waiting for for a while now, albeit he appears in an oddly different look…and not even entirely. While brainwashing Optimus Prime, the evil Quintessareveals to him that Earth is actually what in Cybertron‘s legends is called Unicron, an evil nemesis to Cybertron that must be destroyed. From Earth, in fact, six giant spikes emerge, and at the end of the movie a disguised Quintessa offers her knowledge on how to kill the creature they belong to. Unicron is not a planet in the original continuity, rather a devourer of planets, some sort of evil version of Galactusfrom the Marvel Universe. His presence in the movie continuity may hint at interesting future developments, let’s see together why is that…

At the beginning of space and time, there was only The One, a creature in which Chaos and Order coexisted. The only inhabitant of a newborn multiverse, the One wanted to explore and know it, so he split in two different beings: Unicron and Primus, each one of them the embodiment of a different primordial principle (chaos and order, evil and good), each one of them unique in every universe. Unicron could cross any reality, perceiving them all and constantly analyzing them all, while Primus inhabited them all at once. While Primus wanted to embark in his original mission of exploring the cosmos, however, Unicron only wanted to destroy it, wishing to be the only living being ruling over the Void, the dark emptiness that existed before reality (or realities) did. Primus tried to stop his twin brother, but Unicron proved to be stronger than him: the duel between the two siblings continued across realities, and eventually Primus understood he had to outsmart the stronger opponent. He moved the fight to the astral plane, and Unicron followed him there, believing he was trying to flee from him; when he followed him back to the physical world, however, Unicron found his essence trapped into a mechanical planetoid, falling into his brother’s trap. Although Primus hoped that the trap could hold his brother (and himself) forever, Unicron kept trying to break free, until he understood he didn’t have to destroy the planet: he could make it part of his own. His essence “possessed” the world, so that he was now a living planet free to move in the universe; the same did Primus, so the conflict between the two started again. Unicron learnt to control the metal he was now composed of, and he became able of transforming himself into a gargantuan robotic warrior, a humanoid the size of a planet; taking the idea of transformation from his brother, Primus, who was now the planet Cybertron, created some mechanical warriors who could change shape as well, and he gave them the mission of destroying his brother. These warriors were The Thirteen, the first Transformers in history. Unicron was now facing both his brother and his champions.

Apart from direct confrontation, Unicron had learnt other ways to fight his battles in his millennia of imprisonment, and he managed to convert one of the Thirteen, who would have later known only as The Fallen, to his cause, and he transformed him into his first acolyte. The battle continued, with the remaining twelve Transformers fighting Unicron and the Fallen, until the latter two were brought too close to a black hole, and disappeared in it. Albeit Unicron had seemingly vanished from reality, Primus decided to enter an eternal slumber, so that, if Unicron had survived, he wouldn’t have been able to track him with their psychic bond. Unicron was, in fact, still alive, and he used his powers to escape his dimensional prison and to look for his brother, the only obstacle to his goal of total annihilation of life, in every reality he could reach. While travelling from universe to universe, Unicron collected a growing number of acolytes, warriors who fell victim to his charisma and who chose to follow him lured by the promise of godly powers (but at the cost of their sanity), or whom he brainwashed to do his bidding. Finally, millennia after their last battle, Primus was accidentally reawakaned by Autobots and Decepticons, whose civil war had reached the nucleus of Cybertron where the god was sleeping. Primus was fast to reenter his slumber, but the Primal Scream he had emitted the moment he had regained consciousness was more than enough for Unicron to locate him. Wanting to investigate on the matter, Unicron dispatched four of his best minions to Cybetron, with the order to kill the dormant Primus if he really was there: he sent Hook, Line and Sinker from planet Ghennix, and even a Cybertronian from an alternate future in which he had triumphed over his brother, Galvatron. The latter, however, was a leader of his own, and wasn’t happy to serve under a master whose sole promise was to annihilate him along with the rest of the universe: instead of killing Primus, Galvatron abducted Emirate Xaaron, the leader of the Autobots, and forced him to awake Primus, so that he could dispose of Unicron. Finally, the war between the two primeval gods could restart, and now they both had a loyal army on their side, promising a cosmic conflict the likes nobody had ever seen since the dawn of the multiverse.

Unicron is a totally malicious being, the embodiment of all the chaos and the evil energy that inhabited the cosmos at the moment of its beginning, devoted entirely to the destruction of every form of life, energy and matter in the multiverse but himself. Driven by a neverending hatred towards his brother Primus, who’s the only one standing in his way to destroy the multiverse, Unicron taints and corrupts everything he touches, converting many to his genocidal cause according godly powers to his followers. A cosmic being, Unicron is a giant the size of a planet, with immeasurable strength, invulnerable and immortal; he can absorb and manipulate a limitless amount of energy, and he can hypnotize any living Transformer to become his accolyte; his conscience embraces every possible reality, and he can move through them freely; he can also transform into a huge planet and, sometimes, even into an immense tank. A threat to the universe like no other, Unicron is a primeval destroyer, whose sole purpose is to annihilate everything that exists to return to the peace of the Void.